Summary Of Against School By John Gatto

In “Against School,” John Gatto argues that the main purpose of public schools and the educational system in general is to produce a “manageable” populace. Gatto argues that the current educational system does this by slowly acclimating students into certain habits, confirming students to certain rules, and implementing a certain mindset into students that makes them respond well to authority. All of these things that Gatto argues adds up to make a system for training a complaint workforce. Firstly, schools achieve what Gatto states their purpose is by acclimating students to how factories are organized and what working in a factory is like. Secondary, schools also accomplish Gattos argument by restricting the class choices of students and …show more content…
Firstly, schools eliminate qualities that makes every student unique by “dulling” their minds and by in some cases putting students under dress codes that are too strict. Schools “dull” students by giving them problems to solve and then telling them that there is only one way to do those problems; by telling students that there is only one way to find the answer then students are taught to not think critically and this results in them being not very smart. The point of creating students who cannot think critically is that they end up being dependent on others and do not gain any leadership skill, this results in a society where most people only know how to follow and not to lead. Schools gives each student a long list of classes that they need in order to graduate from high school, this “dulls” them by not giving them much room to choose their own paths of learning. While you can argue that even though schools give students the opportunity to choose the order in which they take the required classes and the opportunity to choose certain optional classes; the fact is that the classes that are required to take fills up the majority of each students schedule. By filling up the majority of a students schedule, students cannot take certain classes that interest them, this results in not knowing what they want to do and they end up taking generic jobs. Also, Schools put students under dress codes to restrict how they choose to express themselves and to “conform” them to the standards of society. An example would be how at my school boys are not allowed to have hair that goes past their eyes in the front and cannot have hair on the side that goes below their earlobes, this rule has the effect of “conforming” some of the students to standard that guys can only have